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Updated: Jul 27, 2026

Examining Recall Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood Using the Elicited Imitation Paradigm
Published on: April 28, 2016
Comprehension skill, inference-making ability, and their relation to knowledge
K Cain1, J V Oakhill, M A Barnes
1University of Sussex, Brighton, England. kcain@essex.ac.uk
Abstract:
In this study we investigated the relation between young children's comprehension skill and inference-making ability using a procedure that controlled individual differences in general knowledge (Barnes & Dennis, 1998; Barnes, Dennis, & Haefele-Kalvaitis, 1996). A multiepisode story was read to the children, and their ability to make two types of inference was assessed: coherence inferences, which were essential for adequate comprehension of the text, and elaborative inferences, which enhanced the text representation but which were not crucial to understanding. There was a strong relation between comprehension skill and inference-making ability even when knowledge was equally available to all participants. Subsidiary analyses of the source of inference failures revealed different underlying sources of difficulty for good and poor comprehenders.
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